Perception最新文献

Faces are critical stimuli used for many social cognitive processes, believed to be served by specialised neural processes in the visual system. A recently described face size illusion shows that upright faces are perceived as physically smaller than inverted faces, and may provide insight into the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying human face perception. In this study, we investigated whether the face size illusion is specific to whole faces or whether it occurs as well for isolated face parts. The results provided a clear replication of the face size illusion for whole faces. In striking contrast, no comparable illusion was found for isolated noses, mouths, and eyes. For eyes, there was in fact an illusion in the opposite direction. These results provide further evidence for the specificity of the face size illusion and suggest that it may arise from the holistic processing of the face as an entire unit, rather than localised processing of individual face parts.

This study investigated the role of perceptual learning in the composite face effect (CFE), which is characterized by reduced accuracy in recognizing the top half of a face when it is combined with the bottom half of another face, particularly when the composite is upright and aligned, compared to when the two halves are laterally offset (misaligned). The misalignment disrupts configural/holistic processing, affecting recognition performance. Experiment 1a (n = 96) employed prototype-defined checkerboards to investigate the presence of the composite effect. The advantage of using these stimuli is that expertise can be precisely controlled. Experiment 1b (n = 96) aimed to replicate the composite effect using face stimuli, serving as a control and enabling direct comparison of the effect between face and checkerboard stimuli. Both experiments employed a full design that included congruent and incongruent, aligned and misaligned composites to measure the composite effect. Results from Experiment 1a indicated that the composite effect could not be obtained with checkerboard composites, whereas Experiment 1b confirmed the robust presence of the CFE in face stimuli. Based on these findings, we can interpret that perceptual learning does not significantly contribute to the CFE.

Visual Snow (VS) syndrome is a neurological condition characterised by the constant perception of small flicking dots across the visual field. These symptoms are thought to be caused by hyperexcitability in the visual cortex. This study examined the potential link between VS and susceptibility to the face pareidolia (FP) illusion, where faces are perceived in inanimate objects. Using a self-report VS questionnaire and a standard FP sensitivity task, we collected data remotely from 132 individuals with VS and 104 age-matched controls. Results revealed higher FP sensitivity in individuals with VS, amplified in those with co-occurring migraines. Non-parametric analyses confirmed elevated face scores for VS participants, even when migraines were excluded. A rank-order analysis showed consistency in response patterns across groups, ruling out the idea that extraordinary responses to one stimulus drove the group difference. These findings suggest that individuals with VS syndrome have an increased susceptibility to the FP illusion. Future research should investigate whether hyperexcitability in the visual cortex is the cause.

We explored whether providing information that artistic photography depicts individuals on the autism spectrum and their special interests influences viewers' preferences. Our findings demonstrated a positive impact of providing such information on participants' ratings of aesthetic emotions and judgments. The present study suggests that artistic activities showing autistic individuals can serve as positive self-advocacy tools when framed by contextual information.

Spatially aligned faces presented in a continuous stream in the periphery appear distorted and grotesque. This flashed face distortion effect ("FFDE") was first reported over 10 years ago, yet little is known about the underlying mechanisms. Here we investigate whether the FFDE persists across visual field locations when there is a change in position. Face streams were presented at one location for several seconds and then either remained at the same location, or were shifted to a new location, either across visual half-fields (Experiment 1) or within the same visual half-field (Experiment 2). We assessed the perceived illusion magnitudes continuously throughout each trial using a joystick as a response device and found that the illusion decreased significantly when the location changed. In the third experiment we added a control condition that did not elicit an illusion and found that the decrease in reported distortions for location-shift trials was of the same magnitude as this baseline condition. Together, our results suggest that the FFDE may be bound to retinotopic locations, at least when location changes are relatively large.

Ordnance Survey (OS) remote sensing surveyors have extensive experience with aerial views of scenes and objects. Building on our previous work with this group, we investigated whether their expertise influenced performance on a same/different object recognition task involving houses. In an online study, these stimuli were shown from both familiar ground-level viewpoints and from what is for most people, unfamiliar aerial viewpoints. OS experts and novices compared achromatic, disparity-free images with aerial perspectives rotated around the clock against canonical ground-views; we measured response times (RTs) and sensitivities (d'). In two 'grounding' tasks using rotated letters, we found conventional outcomes for both groups, validating the online approach. Experiment 1 (non-matching letters) yielded ceiling-level performance with no signs of mental rotation, consistent with a feature-based recognition strategy. In Experiment 2 (mirror reversed letters), both groups showed orientation-dependent performance, but experts exhibited a speed-accuracy trade-off, responding more cautiously than novices. In the main house task (Experiment 3), we found (a) the same speed-accuracy trade-off observed in Experiment 2, (b) substantially longer RTs overall, and (c) no evidence for mental rotation in either group, mirroring Experiment 1. Contrary to our earlier findings on aerial depth perception, expertise in remote sensing did not yield a distinctive recognition strategy for the experiments here. However, experts displayed more diligent tactics in Experiments 2 and 3. We suggest that all participants in Experiment 3 engaged in cognitively challenging feature comparisons across viewpoints, presumably supported by volumetric or surface-connected prototypes of houses as the basis for feature comparisons.

While intuitive for humans, the concept of visual complexity is hard to define and quantify formally. We suggest adopting the multiscale structural complexity (MSSC) measure, an approach that defines structural complexity of an object as the amount of dissimilarities between distinct scales in its hierarchical organization. In this work, we apply MSSC to the case of visual stimuli, using an open dataset of images with subjective complexity scores obtained from human participants (SAVOIAS). We demonstrate that MSSC correlates with subjective complexity on par with other computational complexity measures, while being more intuitive by definition, consistent across categories of images, and easier to compute. We discuss objective and subjective elements inherently present in human perception of complexity and the domains where the two are more likely to diverge. We show how the multiscale nature of MSSC allows further investigation of complexity as it is perceived by humans.

The colors and lines that compose perceptual experience result from the interplay between visual processing pathways and the light that hits the retina. So it is striking that many individuals seem to also experience these visual properties even in the absence of explicit sensory cues-as in the phenomenon of "scaffolded attention." When observing a uniform grid of squares, people report perceiving the squares as grouped into shapes or patterns, where the squares sometimes appear brighter or colored (for "shaders"), or bolded or outlined (for "bolders"). With 100 observers, we used an interactive grid to characterize the prevalence and magnitude of these experiences. Results showed that people's experiences could be modulated by grid contrast, that is, 89% of hallucinators reporting "bolding" on a black grid, while only 36% on a white one. Thus, stimulus factors may influence what gets selected-the squares (for shaders) or the lines (for bolders)-as the raw material for "everyday hallucinations" in scaffolded attention.

Previous research has demonstrated that words associated with brightness (e.g., "sun") elicit smaller pupil diameters than those related to darkness (e.g., "night"). The present study aimed to determine whether these language-induced pupillary responses are driven by the luminance of the mentally simulated content-referred to here as sensory interpretation-or by the conceptual brightness linked to the words' emotional valence, termed emotional interpretation. To address this question, we utilized the Japanese adjectives akarui and kurai, which can denote both luminance, as in the noun phrase akarui/kurai gamen ("bright/dark screen"), and emotional valence, as in akarui/kurai seikaku ("cheerful/gloomy personality"). Participants were presented with noun phrases composed of these adjectives and various nouns (akarui/kurai + noun). A significant main effect of the adjective indicated that phrases containing akarui yielded smaller pupil diameters than those containing kurai. Furthermore, although the interaction effect did not reach significance, the adjective effect was observed only when the adjectives conveyed luminance, not when they conveyed emotional valence. These findings suggest that sensory, rather than emotional, interpretation better explains language-induced changes in pupil size. The use of pupillometry as a measure of perceptual simulation offers more direct and compelling evidence in support of the central claim of embodied language theories: that during language comprehension, readers and listeners spontaneously generate sensorimotor simulations of the described content. Future studies are warranted to examine whether these findings extend to sentence- and discourse-level processing, as well as to simulations of information conveyed implicitly or indirectly through language.